Diagnosis of failures in concrete structures

Abstract

The concrete structures often suffer several kinds of damages over their service life. Therefore, it is extremely important to identify these damages, as soon as possible, in order to take preventive actions for the structural health. In this chapter, several methods are studied and applied to crack detection in concrete structures, between them, the method of displacement variation, the method of elastic curvature, the inverse method, and the application of the wavelet transform. Furthermore, the use of thermography, as a non-contact diagnostic method, has been studied. The purpose of these methods is detection, localization and, if it is possible, the quantification of the damage. Then, this information can be useful to design the repair of the structure. The studies have been performed on a set of three-dimensional numerical models, using the finite element method. Complementarily, a set of experimental models consisting of concrete beams, have been built in the laboratory. Different sensitivity analyses have been successfully carried out, to determine the parameters required for the implementation of the diagnostic methods in practice. Then, the different methods have been compared and the corresponding advantages and disadvantages, in each case, have been analyzed.